Life would also be easier if the whole world spoke english, but guess what, it ain't the case...
So nail yourself into your little corner and stay there while the W3C tries to make the world wide web really world wide. That's fine with me.
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Arnaud Le Hors - IBM, XML Standards Strategy Group / W3C AC Rep.
Elliotte Rusty Harold wrote:
At 12:34 PM -0800 11/22/03, Arnaud Le Hors wrote:
Oh I see, you're one of those who just don't want to hear about any new version of XML.
Well, I don't know about any new version. So far we've only got one new version,and it's a dog. Maybe in the future the W3C will come out with one that's actually useful, and solves real needs.
But as you say it yourself, the idea that there is only one way to parse XML is already an illusion. The list of possible behaviors for a compliant XML 1.0 parser is already large enough that one cannot blindly rely on interoperability just because he uses XML. You have to deal with a whole range of variations from a minimally conformant non validating parser to a fully conformant validating parser, with or without namespaces support, with or without XML Schema validation, with or without XInclude support, and the list goes on... So the reality is that adding XML 1.1 to the mix doesn't make much difference. And ignoring the need for evolution is absurd.
XML 1.1 is qualitatively different. None of the examples you cite change the definition of what is a well-formed or malformed XML document. XML 1.1 does. All of the examples you cite can be parsed with a minimally conformant XML 1.1 parser. An XML 1.1 document cannot be.
Believe me, I'm the first to wish they got XML 1.0 right in the first place, but they didn't. And I don't blame them, that's life. Just be glad that those of us who fought to get XML 1.1 open enough so that we won't need to revise it again when a new version of Unicode comes out prevailed.
I'm not surprised it wasn't right the first time either. In fact if anything I'm surprised it's as good as it is. There really are very few design mistakes in XML 1.0. It's a very nice piece of work. Unfortunately XML 1.1 doesn't fix the mistakes in XML 1.0. It just makes several new ones, among them allowing characters that aren't even defined in Unicode and never will be to be used in XML names.
What I think we need is to define some kind of profiles that nails down the number of possible behaviors to just a few. Something that is named, that implementers can advertise as something they support, and that users can look for. Similar to what you get with the Java platforms labels J2EE, J2SE, J2ME, etc.
Now if XML 1.1 had done that it might have some purpose in the world.
I was discussing this with Tim Berners-Lee this week and he agrees that it would be good. However, he thought that should be a new version of XML. Something I'd rather avoid, but I have to admit that it'd be good to be able to label your document somehow so that the processor could tell whether it can process it as you want it to be processed. This also brings us back into the processing model issue which has been in the air for a while. I don't see these problems to be solved any time soon unfortunately.
I prefer Tim Bray's skunkworks approach of removing the uninteroperable pieces. Otherwise we're just back in SGML land where no two parsers acted alike, and documents weren't interoperable in practice. Getting rid of the SGML declaration was a good thing.
As Santayna wrote in 1905, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The people who gave us XML remembered the history of SGML, and thus didn't repeat its mistakes. I'm saddened to see that those who've come after them have forgotten what went wrong with SGML, and are proceeding to repeat its mistakes, one after the other.
So, in the meantime, the best we can do is to work on making 1.1 omnipresent as quickly as possible so that we can put the burden of transitioning behind us.
I prefer the alternate approach of driving every nail I can find into XML 1.1's coffin so that we don't have to transition at all. After all, it's not like XML 1.1 is actually useful in any significant way.
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